She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [149]
The first major hearing on the Beard case in the 390th District Court, where Celeste was scheduled to be tried, took place that November 2002. The 390th was presided over by Judge Julie Kocurek, who could have been the prototype for TV’s Judging Amy. Trim, with large hazel eyes and straight, dark blond hair, Kocurek looked more like a soccer mom than a criminal court judge. Looks can be deceiving, however. As a prosecutor, Kocurek had tried rapists, child abusers, and murderers, including an eleven-year-old boy who stabbed a man ninety-nine times, then fed his ears to a dog.
Appointed by then-Governor George W. Bush, Kocurek came to the bench in 1999 as the first woman to head a Travis County felony court. At the time, she was pregnant with twins, a boy and a girl. In the 2000 election she became the first Republican judge elected in Austin, a city so liberal that a Green Party candidate once totaled twenty-five percent of the vote. One reason: She bore a familiar name. Her grandfather-in-law, Willie Kocurek, was an appliance dealer turned civic leader, known for his humor, who’d worked to improve public schools. Beyond that, the courthouse scuttlebutt was that Judge Kocurek belonged on the bench; she knew the law and ran a fair courtroom.
That day in Kocurek’s courtroom, the issue was the admissibility of evidence—the journals, cards, and calendars the twins and their friends had collected from Celeste’s storage bins. Even the way DeGuerin titled the motion elicited strong emotions: “Motion to Suppress Evidence Stolen from the Defendant’s Home.”
That first day of pretrial testimony would be the hardest for the twins. The thought of seeing Celeste again, this time in her jail uniform, of having to testify in front of her, sent chills through both of them. Yet one thing had markedly changed for them both: They no longer felt alone. Months earlier, Ellen Halbert, director of the district attorney’s Victim Witness Division, called Mange, offering to help with the case by acting as an intermediary with the Beard children. Exhausted by calls from the twins and Justin, Mange eagerly turned that portion of the case over to her.
With short, highlighted brown hair and a maternal manner, Halbert understood the emotions the girls battled. She, too, had been through a horrific ordeal. Years earlier an eighteen-year-old drifter hid in her home and raped and stabbed her. She barely survived. Helping others victimized by violent crime brought her to the attention of then-Governor Ann Richards, who appointed her to the board that oversees prisons, probations, and paroles. Two years after Richards left office, District Attorney Ronnie Earle asked her to join his office, supervising eight counselors and four staffers who work with more than four thousand victims and their families each year.
Halbert had heard people talking about the Beard case around the office for months before she met the girls for the first time. At that first meeting, she knew they were frightened. She thought they looked like scared children, and her heart went out to them. Yet, before long the girls opened up, glad to have her to confide in. On the day of the pretrial, Halbert accompanied them to the courtroom and sat in a front row seat, where they could look at her instead of their mother while they testified.
“You stole those things from your mother’s storage, didn’t you?” DeGuerin accused.
“Some of it looked like it didn’t need to be thrown away,” Jennifer countered. “It looked interesting, so we kept it.”
Calling the twins “spoiled brats,” DeGuerin railed against them.
At one point, when Celeste looked away, Jennifer shot her a quick glance. There sat her mother, laughing with the attorneys clustered about her. She must think the whole thing’s a joke, Jennifer thought.
In the back hallway, after Jennifer finished testifying, Wetzel put her arm around her as she sobbed, her shoulders heaving at the emotional turmoil of testifying